Samuel J. Ferguson

Ph.D. Candidate in Mathematics

Biography

Sam Ferguson is a MacCracken Fellow and PhD candidate at the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences within NYU. His PhD advisor is Scott Armstrong, and the topic of his dissertation is stochastic homogenization. In particular, it considers an analogue of Hilbert's 19th problem in this context. He enjoys thinking about questions like, "How small can computer chips be made, if manufacturing causes random errors?" which is a natural stochastic homogenization problem.

Before coming to NYU, Sam was a graduate student at the University of Iowa for four years, from 2010 to 2014. In Iowa, he studied solitons in physics, which explain both solitary canal waves and how fiber optics provide high speed internet. In Iowa, he also studied Fuglede's conjecture, which says that a set tiles space exactly when it has a Fourier basis. Counterexamples exist in general, but it is known to be true in various special cases. He has recently returned to this harmonic analysis research.

Sam has also been involved with a variety of outreach activities, encouraging women, students with Asperger's syndrome, and those from socioeconomically underpriveleged groups to pursue the academic interests which most excite them, through activites such as co-organizing Sonia Kovalevsky Day, publishing with the Belin-Blank Center, and giving talks to high school students through Courant Splash.

Sam has taught and tutored students at a variety of levels, from middle school to graduate school, and created a variety of problem-based learning resources for them.

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